When I talk about my FarmTina project, I often hear the response, "I wish I could grow food but I just don't have any space!" To that I say, PHOOEY. Excuses, excuses.

Yes, lack of space is one of my biggest challenges in gardening in the city, but that has actually been a fun obstacle to overcome. As a reminder, I've had only a paved patio for the last 2 years, no ground soil at all, so everything I've grown has been in containers of some sort. I suppose I could've filled my yard with fancy terra cotta pots and structured grow beds, but that just seems wasteful and expensive. Instead, I got creative.

My most recent space-saving project was featured in an episode of GROW, a Whole Foods video series documenting urban farmers around the country. I simply needed more space, so I decided to build an outdoor-strength vertical grow bag that would hang on the fence surrounding my yard. And, of course, it would need to look cute.

Check out the video to see the grow bag in action, and then make your own! The "instructions" are more like beginner's guidance, and I'd love to hear your updates & improvements to my first-time experiment. Here's how to make my outdoor vertical planter (written instructions below the diagrams):

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

I spent hours at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden last week. I went there specifically looking for the Wisteria, which is my spirit flower, and which I love so much that smelling it makes me feel high and looking at it makes my pupils dilate. Thank God for Wisteria!

While I was exploring the rest of the gardens, I came across something that made me laugh out loud: The garden of plants native to New York City. This garden was literally just rows and rows of all the weeds that keep popping up in my veggie beds! My first instinct was to scream and point and start pulling them all up by their roots (but don't worry, I didn't).

This got me thinking about the nature of weeds. Just like the word "Art", defining weeds is all about intention. If my entire garden is intended to be tomato plants, then anything else sprouting up in the soil is going to be considered a weed. Even Wisteria, when sprouting unintentionally in my tomatoes, would have to be weeded out. (Well, maybe I'd keep that plant as an exception... but you know what I mean!) And tomato plants, when sprouting in a flower bed, become weeds. No plant should be inherently defined as a weed.

So I'd like to publically apologize to the Native Flora Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for being such a jerk and laughing in his face! Our local NYC plants are just as special and valued as anything else I may be planting in my garden. But I'm still going to weed them out.

Saturday, April 27, 2013

Everyone wants to know about the rats. "You grow food in New York City? But what about the rats? Doesn't your garden attract rodents? Don't they eat your food?" When I first told my new neighbor that I planned on having a garden in the summer, this was his immediate reaction. Since his backyard is connected to mine, I absolutely understand his concern and appreciate that my garden can affect his yard, too.

A farm or garden anywhere--heck, a simple yard anywhere-- is going to have natural pests, whether it's deer out in the country or feral cats here in the city. So my short answer is, yes, there are rats sometimes, but no more than any other Brooklyn yard with or without a garden. The important thing is to garden responsibly so you don't attract more rats. Here are some tips to keep in mind:

Friday, April 26, 2013

Welcome to the first growing season here at Farmtina3, my brand new apartment with a brand new concrete alley "yard". Yes, this is the third apartment where I've been on this gardening adventure. And like I have with every new space, I'm discovering new problems-- no, wait-- new challenges to be conquered. Challenge Number One:

I do not have access to water in my new gardening space.

There is no outdoor water supply for watering my plants, which is sort of a big issue. I know how to get around having no soil, and even no sun, but no water? Doesn't work!

So I'm researching rain barrels. A rain barrel is just what it sounds like: a container that catches rain water and stores it to be used to water your plants.

But, oh! A rain barrel is more than just a bucket of water! It needs to be sealed off enough so you don't lose water to evaporation and don't become a mosquito breeding ground, yet open enough to actually catch the rain. It needs to have a hose connection to make it functional for watering plants. And it has to be durable so it won't rust and my friends the NYC rats don't chew through it to get to the water on hot days.

Even if you do have access to water in your garden, you might want to consider supplementing it with a rain barrel. Here are a few benefits:

Sunday, June 10, 2012

I've been doing this urban gardening project for about three years now, and this will be the third place I've lived in those 3 years. This is one of the main challenges that makes NYC gardening so difficult: We are a city of renters (about 70% of us rent instead of own our homes, according to the New York Times), so we have to figure out how to grow long-term plants in temporary spaces which we have no control over.

My solution to this problem has always been container gardening. I grow everything, even 6-foot tall corn, in buckets & bins so that when I move I just pack the binned plants into the back of a van and bring them to the new yard. The place I'm living now was an especially exciting move because it actually has soil in the yard instead of a fully paved space like I had before, so when I moved here I began transplanting my bucket plants into the ground.

Now that I'm moving again only 8 months later and in the middle of the growing season, I'll need to get a little creative (and I may even have to leave some of my babies behind). I still have the majority of my plants in buckets, but I did already move my lily bulbs to the ground (and OHMYGOSH did they thrive like never before) as well as my strawberries, mint, chives, and smaller spring flower bulbs. I had also been starting seedlings with the intention of transplanting them into the ground, but the time to transplant came about the same time I learned of the move, so I didn't do it and I sacrificed a few seedlings because they had nowhere to go.

But, dear readers, don't be sad, because this is actually good news and I've been sneakily hiding it from you for 4 paragraphs. The reason I'm moving is because I bought a home!!!!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's a condo in a building with 8 units, and I'm on the first floor with a private backyard. The yard is a total blank slate concrete slab, with not so much as a single flower pot or chair. I can build permanent planter boxes! I can set up a greenhouse! I can get chickens! My yard is protected on both sides, so no more kids jumping my fence from the street to smash my terra cotta pots!!! Life is good.

The first thing I'm going to do is build my planter boxes. I was totally inspired by Dave at Fancy Hands, who used found & recycled materials to build some really cool designy furniture at their office. I cornered Dave at a bar on Friday and coerced him into offering to help build my planters. I didn't ask! He offered! All I did was say I needed help... and a circular saw... and oh, would he like to come over my new place for dinner on July 1st? And maybe bring his saw?

So first I'll build the planters, and then I'll dig up the plants I currently have growing in the ground and move them to the new planters. Then I can worry about the rest of the move. As long as my transplanted plants are safe, I'll feel unstressed. Hopefully.

Friday, April 06, 2012

Gramulator (as I call her) was born in the 1930s and raised in New York City by a very young immigrant single mom, my Great-Grandmother BabiBabi. BabiBabi kept an urban garden on the roof of their tenement building to be able to feed the family, relying on found & recycled objects such as the wooden gun boxes she used as planters. She was "upcycling" not because it was the fun trendy hobby it is today, but because she had no other choice.

Gramulator has told me lots of stories about her childhood, and I know she's happy that I'm continuing the urban gardening tradition. She recently emailed me a story that I'd like to share-- that's right, Gramulator uses email, IM, and even Facebook. I told you she was cool!

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Gardeners! Get out of the dirt, put on some shoes that are not garden clogs, and go out to these exhibits right now. Maybe even bring a date:

1. The Orchid Show, New York Botanical Garden in NYC through April 22, 2012

I walked through The Orchid Show with my mouth hanging open. This experience is a double whammy: First, it's the tenth year that the NYBG has exhibited a show of orchids from around the world, ranging from delicate pink loners in a single tiny pot to tangles of giant red flowers hanging together from the ceiling. But the second element to this year's show is the vertical gardens created by botanical artist Patrick Blanc. He built floor to ceiling structures of exotic orchids that literally climb the walls, using the colors, sizes and textures of the flowers to create really stunning pieces.

I attended one of the evening shows, which included cocktails and "orchid music" with my admission ticket. The Boyfriend noted that the DJ was perfect for the atmosphere, and wondered if he exclusively played flower shows. I believe that is very possible.

Watch this video of Patrick Blanc discussing something... What is he saying? Who knows! I'm one of those annoying Americans who has a really hard time understanding foreign accents!

2. The Glass Flowers, permanent exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Boston

The Glass Flowers have been on exhibit at Harvard for years, and I just finally made it to the gallery to see them. This is a room full of 800 hand-made glass models of flower species used for botanical study, so every one is perfectly accurate and detailed. Many of the species include englarged areas and cross sections, also made out of glass. The flowers were created from 1886 through 1936 by glassmakers in Germany.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Here in New York City we've had a strangely warm winter, the second warmest winter ever on record here. This is wonderful when it comes to waiting at the bus stop on cold winter mornings and being able to wear dresses without double layers of tights. But when it comes to my garden, this is some tough stuff.

I started noticing a problem in December, when we had days over 60 degrees at a time we New Yorkers are used to seeing snow storms. My perennial plants, which have a growth cycle that includes a necessary cold winter dormancy period, just kept growing. They and I were both so confused.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

This is something I can't stop thinking about so I need to share it (hey, what else is a blog for, right?)

I had no television and very limited access to pop culture as a kid-- my parents would only allow me to watch video tapes of The Prisoner, the British Sherlock Holmes series, and Star Trek until I left for college. I'm not kidding.

So for years I've been catching up on my old TV and movies with Netflix, and as you can imagine, I'm devouring terrible 90s sitcoms and John Hughes movies. Recently I decided to watch all 9 seasons of The X-Files.

The intro to The X-Files is hilarious: it's a montage of supposedly supernatural and spooky images, intermingled with scenes of Agents Mulder and Scully looking very serious. And just in case you don't totally get it, descriptive phrases splash across the screen: "Government denies knowledge" and "Paranormal activity". But when "Paranormal activity" appears on the screen, it's not paired with a paranormal image. It's paired with an image of a seed germinating.

A seed, germinating! Possibly the most natural un-paranormal activity that happens on this planet. The seed is sprouting its first shoot.

Not cool, X-Files. Not cool. If this "paranormal activity" is not actually paranormal, does that mean I can't believe the rest of your stories? No stretchy man living in the sewars? No cloned children named Adam & Eve? I know the truth is out there, but I guess it's not in The X-Files.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

About 8 months ago, a film crew came to FarmTina to film for a long weekend. They were working on a documentary series called Grow that was tracking the new generation of farmers around the United States. This included large-scale farmers with 50 years of experience, families raising meat in small city yards, and me! Me me! Me, among all the other real farmers!

Each episode is a short focusing on one person's story. Here's mine.

BONUS: Want to make the vertical planter featured in this video? Here's my step-by-step instructions! It's super easy, only requires tools that you already have around the house, and is made from cheap materials.

Friday, January 13, 2012

My mom Jo Ann taught me how to be an artist, a gardener, and an independent & curious thinker. She has a great city garden in Quincy, MA where she has found creative ways to produce loads of veggies, herbs, flowers and compost within unusual spaces, all while balancing her time-consuming career and constant world traveling. She learned this really cool seaweed trick from my great-grandmother, so I asked her to share it with you as we all prepare for the spring.

See weeds? Use Seaweed!

As a young girl, I remember spending time with my grandmother on Cape Cod. She had the most amazing vegetable garden, and spending time with her, my job was to pull weeds. Often, we would walk down to the nearby beach and collect seaweed. My grandmother would use the seaweed as a mulch to keep the weeds under control. She would spread it out around the plants, both flowers and vegetables, and have very little weeds to tend.

Thursday, January 05, 2012

Goofy name, but awesome color! It's like a natural tangerine fruit got a sunburn, and then went dancing so his cheeks got red and sweaty and he had that free-wheelin' happy glow. And I must say, for the record, that I predicted the 2012 Color of the Year would be a lavender, but my Domestic Partner was spot-on when he predicted "a mesa orange". He's obviously a genius.

"What about Amaryllis?", you ask. Well here's where the universe gets awesome: I was already planning to write about Amaryllis today and then the universe chooses this color of the year and validates my place in the world.

Amaryllis flowers are one of those things that people often confuse, kinda like the difference between macarons and macaroons. This, my friends, is not a true Amaryllis:

Monday, January 02, 2012

Holidays are over, and I'm finally back in Brooklyn after a very loooong visit with my parents, grandparents, sister and cousins. I spent nearly five days in the suburbs for Christmas! FIVE! Thank goodness I'm home.

Now that I'm crafting a home with my new Domestic Partner, I'm making some discoveries. (Sidenote: I borrowed the phrase "crafting a home" from a cute DIY home blog and I need to give props to the blogger Kim. It describes me perfectly!) I'm doing a lot of new things in this home that I never did before, such as sharing a bedroom (which means no more pink lace comforter) and sharing my food (guess who ate all the Pignoli cookies?!) (Ok ok, it was me. If I don't confess, he'll start a rant in the comments). BUT I DIGRESS!

What I'm saying is, this is the first time I've had my own Christmas tree! I never had one in my early twenties because I needed to save my money for drugs (KIDDING, MOM), and then I had a Jewish roommate for 5 years who didn't want one and it didn't really bother me. For Christmas 2011, we decided to go with a teensy apartment-sized potted-plant tree. It is literally 2 feet tall and I love it.

I chose a live Christmas tree in a pot because I love houseplants, so I hope to keep this lil' guy all year 'round and he'll grow a little big bigger each Christmas. It will be pretty neat 15 years from now to say, "We've had a home together long enough that our Christmas tree is now 4-feet tall!" But also, it's very possible that I can't give it enough light and nutrients indoors and it will die on me by Valentine's Day. Here's a good blog entry on the Norfolk Island Pine, a "year round Christmas tree".

I've always had mixed feelings in general about the whole concept of a Christmas tree. If you get down to the basics, the tradition of Christmas trees simply involves cutting down a 15-year old evergreen tree so that you can keep it in your house for 3 weeks and then get rid of it. Tree murder! Additionally, Christmas trees are a real fire hazard: The NFPA quotes an average of 240 home fires each year that start from Christmas trees, which basically become tall piles of dry fire wood after a few weeks indoors.

Despite all of this, artifical trees are no better. They are actually less eco-friendly than real trees because they produce more greenhouse gases and are made of plastic, which uses more water and other resources to produce, and can't be recycled when you're done with them.

So even though I thought I was anti-Christmas tree for a while, my official position is now: If you're gonna get a tree, get a real one, and get it from a farm. Christmas tree farms eliminate the need to cut trees from forests and create habitats for animals, help reduce soil erosion, produce oxygen, and of course, the trees can be recycled in many ways.

Here's how you can safely and sustainably dispose of your Christmas tree (and do a little good at the same time):

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

It's been a long process, but I've successfully moved the location of FarmTina from a paved back alley in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn where I lived for 2 years, to an almost-real-backyard 20 minutes north in Bushwick, Brooklyn to another rental apartment.

My new yard is "almost real" because although it is still a tiny space surrounded by tall buildings, the yard is only halfway paved. Which means the other half is SOIL! True earthy soil, where I can plant my garden directly in the ground! This is mind blowing.

Next season I'll continue to explore container gardening in my city space, but I'll also be learning old fashioned in-ground gardening for the first time. I'm very excited! Read on for photos of the new space...

Thursday, October 20, 2011

I have some exciting/scary news: I'm in the process of MOVING FarmTina.

Here's a little peek at the almost-clean paved alleyway that was my garden for 2 years. I'm moving everything over to my new home, another neighborhood in Brooklyn, where I have... wait for it... wait for it... A BACK YARD WITH SOIL. Soil! Real land!

Friday, August 26, 2011

This is the view right now looking up at my beanstalk trellis here in Brooklyn, NY. But 24 hours from now, New York City is supposedly going to be in the middle of a massive hurricane. Now listen, dear readers: New York City does not get hurricanes! But then again, we don't get earthquakes or tornadoes either, and both of those have happened here in the last year.

Since I didn't create my garden with the thought that it would ever need to withstand a tornado, earthquake, or hurricane, there seems to be little I can do to "prepare" for the storm. I have already...

Sunday, August 07, 2011

I've been cleaning up after last week's tragic heat wave disaster where I lost quite a few of my plants. The plants I was especially bummed about were my edamame soybeans- I lost 9 out of 14 edamame plants, dried up and brown. They had been growing beans for a few weeks and were just about ready to be harvested when the heat wave hit.

But as I was accepting defeat, cutting and cleaning and getting ready to re-plant in the space where these soybeans once grew, I realized they weren't a total waste... I had accidentally made dried beans!

Beans, such as my edamame, grow in pods. Some bean pods are edible (snow peas!), but some pods are just cases to hold the food. Humans figured out long ago that beans can be stored for long periods of time by pulling them out of the pods and drying them into hard little rocks (the oldest presered soybeans ever found were in Korea, dating back to 1000 BCE). When you want to eat the dried beans, simply soak them in hot water and they are magically rejuvinated! This method of preservation is so simple and smart that we still buy dried beans from grocery stores today.

Aside from being food, beans are also the seeds of the plant. In their natural environment the beans would grow on the plant until the end of the summer season, when the pods and beans would dry out and eventually fall off the plant into the soil. The dried seeds would hibernate there in the soil until warm wet spring, when they will sprout into new plants. The circle of life! AHHH!!

The heatwave did all of this for me. It dried up the nearly-ripe beans into nice preserved little balls, so when I cut down the plant, I had handfulls of dried soybeans. I collected all of the beans. (And PS, you can see in the photo below that I'm wearing my slammin' new Sally Hansen Salon Effects nail strips in the pattern "Girl Flower"!)

Once I had these dried beans, I instantly thought of real life farmers. When something like this happens, they have to make a difficult choice: Do they use these dried beans as food for their family, or do they save them as seed for next year's crop? If I was living only on the food I grew and the heatwave demolished more than half of my soybeans, this would be a life-changing decision. We lost our crop so we don't have enough food to eat-- maybe we should eat these beans? But losing the crop also means we'll have less seed to plant next year-- maybe we should save it to guarantee we won't starve one year from now?

Thankfully I'm not a subsistance farmer, but this is a very real situation for farmers all over the world. Since I have plenty of other food to eat, I'm not hard pressed to make a decision yet and my dried edamame beans are in a ziploc bag in the fridge.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

You may have heard of, or been affected by, this heat wave that's been moving across the country recently. From what I read, New York City hit 104 degrees last week, and the heat and humidity lasted for so long that the 91-degree day we had this week felt like a cool rest from the heat. But here's the thing: I wasn't in NYC for any of this.

I took an 8-day roadtrip down the Pacific Coast Highway last week, driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles in a fancy new (rental) Mustang convertible, stopping at tiny towns along the way. And yes, it was fantastic, thank you for asking. A good friend offered to care for FarmTina the entire time I was away, and I was grateful for the help and felt a little guilty about leaving her with the daily responsibility. But then my guilt grew when, sometime in the middle of the week, I emerged from a tiny no-cell-service valley town to find texts from her that I had missed while in the dead zone: What special care does the garden need when it's over 100 degrees?

Honestly I had no idea what to tell her. I responded, water the plants multiple times each day, instead of just once. Water early in the morning so that the plants have time to absorb the water before the heat evaporates it away. I thought, move the plants, which are all growing in buckets, into the shade? But that seemed ridiculous, like one of those TSA 8-oz liquid rules that gives the appearance of doing something helpful but it really has no effect on anything.

My kind friend worked very hard to care for my babies, and I am so apologetic that she had to deal with the garden at its worst! Despite all her care and attentiveness, some of the plants didn't make it through the intense heat and sun. You might remember dear readers that this is the second disaster to strike FarmTina in the last year... Brooklyn tornado, anyone?

The wilting plant in the yellow bucket is my edamame, gone beyond repair. Bummer! That bucket is a found & reused Ikea metal trash can, and I'm sure that material contributed to heating up the soil beyond healthy levels. The second edamame plant to the right in a plastic pot is a little brown around the edges but salvageable. The eggplant (the other plastic pot and the black pot) are looking great and are still thriving and blooming!

My poor cucumbers! Before I left they were vining and looking healthy, but now they've totally collapsed. It looks like some cucumbers attempted to ripen during the extreme heat but eventually gave up when their vines died. However, the marigolds growing in the cucumber pots, which act as a natural deterrent to cucumber beetles, are doing fine.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

I am growing eggplant for the first time ever, and it looks beautiful! The plant has large leaves and big purple flowers, and the fruit looks like deep purple marbles before it really takes shape. I know that often times the food I grow in my own garden doesn't look exactly like what we're used to seeing in a grocery store-- the food I grow has imperfect shapes and coloring and minor bruises, but I expect that because I'm not using standardized growing systems and chemical treatments. So herein lies my problem: if I don't know what it's supposed to look like, how do I know when my eggplant is ready to pick?

If I wait for it to look like a long, smooth, perfectly plump purple droplet, I might lose my chance to pick a ripe eggplant. But having never grown this vegetable before, I have nothing to compare it to other than past eggplants I've purchased. Here's what my eggplant plant looks like right now, with one especially large ripening fruit:

(Yes, I know I had a caterpiller problem, but I squashed those little suckers early and you'll see that the newer leaves are perfectly intact!)

I'm pretty sure those tiny little eggplant dudes aren't ready yet, but what about that big guy? He seems to be growing out and wide instead of down and long. Is this a trait of the eggplant breed I planted? Is this normal for home-grown eggplants? Will it start to lengthen out soon and end up looking normal?

Hi! My name is Martina and I have a "farm" in my New York City backyard called FarmTina.

My definition of "farm" is really just a living space that brings together home grown vegetables & fruits, animals, flowers & trees, and concoctions that use all of these ingredients together... read more